I Know Nobody Knows, Where it Comes and Where it Goes...

I was watching a special on Latino communities and their mindset and it occured to me that Latinos deal with a lot of emotional trauma. Minorities do in general. In college my favorite class was Ethnic Psych because it dealt with the feelings of minorites. I think my favorite study is when psychologists showed 30 African American men and women a 30 second tape showing verbal harrassment and a 30 second tape showing physical harrassment of African Americans.

They found that by just showing the tape with the verbal harrassment by white men and women to the African American participants- their blood pressure went up significantly. The psychologists then correlated the rise in blood pressure to the stress factor a minority deals with. Novel idea I know. But to the psychologists this was amazing. They had never thought that being a minority was stressful and hard. See upon noticing that African American men had high instances of hyper tension, they decided to do the study again but to focus on African American men. They hypothesized dumb things like "the reason that African Americans in general have high blood pressure is because culturally they eat fried foods"- you know where this is going. Then they did full lab tests and physicals- no such factors seemed to have a difference. So they tested the video tapes again- it now seemed that African American men were stressed while watching abuse done to other African Americans.

This may sound self-explanatory- but not so if you aren't a minority. Because if you aren't a minority- then you haven't really been exposed to racism and its effects on the body and the mind.

I was reminded of this study a couple of months ago when Moe Moe's then roommate said that she didn't believe that racism exists. Lol- which of course made me laugh. But I guess depending on who you are and what you have experienced, racism can be a subjective thing. It has been a very real and harrowing thing for me, but its never an issue for others. Too bad we can't go back to pre-school when all that mattered was that you had to the share the toys and you got nap time too. I don't think that I ever took advantage of my nap time come to think of it. I was too busy coloring on the cot...